People line up outside of a free COVID-19 vaccine site that opened today in the Hubbard Place apartment building in Washington, DC.
The United States gave 2.2 million doses of the vaccine on Thursday, the highest total in a single day since May.
More than 1 million shots were given yesterday, according to White House COVID-19 Response Coordination. Roughly 200 million Americans are fully vaccined, which is 60 percent of the population, and 44 million are fully vaccined and boosted.
"This is important progress," he said. It's time for you to get your booster if you were fully vaccine free before June. If you are unvaccinated, you should get your first shot today. If your kids are five years old or older, get them the protection of the vaccine as well.
The current vaccines are effective against the delta variant, which is still circulating at high levels nationwide. The US recorded nearly 140,000 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday.
The news is focused on omicron, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She said that most of the cases in the country are from the delta variant. "Our recommendations for protecting against COVID are the same regardless of the variant."
The importance of vaccines, boosters, indoor masking in public settings, hand washing, improving ventilation, and testing were all emphasized by Walensky.
There are vaccines.
Even vaccines and boosters will be effective against omicron, according to health officials. There are unanswered questions about omicron's ability to evade immune responses spurred by vaccines. A number of changes in the highly vexed variant make it difficult for the virus to cause disease.
Advertisement
Recent days have shown that even low levels of neutralizing antibodies can be protective. There are many non-neutralizing antibodies that can attack omicron, and they can also recruit protective immune cells to help fight the virus. The shots can increase the diversity of the neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies. There are also potent cell-based immune responses, which do not rely on antibodies and are likely to remain effective against the variant. Cell-based responses are boosted by third shots.
Health experts think that omicron will reduce the effectiveness of current vaccines. They're confident that vaccines and boosters will offer some protection against omicron.
Anthony Fauci, a top infectious disease expert, said that there is every reason to believe that if you get vaccine and boosted that you would have at least some degree of cross-protection against severe disease.
The spread was swift.
Preliminary data shows that omicron can spread much faster than delta and cause more re infections. The variant may spread more quickly and cause more re-infection in people who had COVID-19 previously, according to early analyses from South Africa. There is still limited data, and the findings have not been published in a scientific journal. They are very preliminary and should be interpreted cautiously.
It will take several weeks to collect more data on the question of omicron's transmissibility, as well as vaccine effectiveness and disease severity.
Around 40 countries have reported cases of omicron since health officials brought the variant to international attention. Several states have identified cases since the US announced its first case in California on Wednesday.
The variant was likely to be circulating for a while before the flurry of detections. Many of the newly detected cases were in travelers who returned to their home countries from southern Africa, but some were not, suggesting domestic transmission is already underway in the US and elsewhere.
